Jonah Goldberg: Disability could now be the new welfare

It asked
everyone receiving an “incapacity benefit” — a disability program slowly being
phased out under new reforms — to submit to a medical test to confirm they were
too disabled to work. A third of recipients (878,000 people) didn’t even bother
and dropped out of the program rather than be examined. Of those tested, more
than half (55 percent) were found fit for work, and a quarter were found fit
for some work.

But
that’s Britain, where there’s a long tradition of gaming the dole. Americans
would never think of taking advantage of the taxpayers or misleading the
government. Well, except for the couple dozen people who have pleaded guilty to
scamming the Long Island Rail Road’s federal disability system in a $1 billion
fraud scheme. A billion bucks would pay for a lot of White House tours.

Though
hardly isolated, the LIRR scandal is an obvious black-and-white case of
criminality. The real problem resides in a grayer area.

In 1960,
when vastly more Americans were involved in physical labor of some kind, 0.65
percent of workforce participants between the ages of 18 and 64 were receiving
Social Security disability insurance payments. Fifty years later, in a much
healthier America, that number has grown nearly nine-fold to 5.6 percent.

In 1960,
134 Americans were working for every officially recognized disabled worker.
Five decades later that ratio fell to roughly 16 to 1.

Some
defenders of the status quo say these numbers can be explained by the entry of
women into the U.S. workforce, the aging of baby boomers and the short-term
spike in need that came with the recession.

No doubt
those are significant factors. But not nearly so significant as to explain why
the number of people on disability has been doubling every 15 years (while the
average age of recipients has gone down) or why such a huge proportion of claim
injuries can’t be corroborated by a doctor.

Nicholas
Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute and the Harvard School of Public
Health notes in his recent book A Nation of Takers: America’s Entitlement
Epidemic that 29 percent of the 8.6 million Americans who received Social
Security disability benefits at the end of 2011 cited injuries involving the
“musculoskeletal system and the connective tissue.” Fifteen percent claimed
“mood disorders.”

It’s
almost impossible, Eberstadt writes, “for a medical professional to disprove a
patient’s claim that he or she is suffering from sad feelings or back pain.”
And that’s assuming a doctor wants to disprove the claim.

In an
illuminating and predictably controversial exposé for This American Life,
NPR’s “Planet Money” team tried to figure out why, since 2009, nearly 250,000
people have been applying for disability every month (while we’ve averaged only
150,000 new jobs every month).

The
answers fall on both sides of the gray middle.

One
factor has to do with what correspondent Chana Joffe-Walt calls the “Vast
Disability Industrial Complex.” These are the sometimes shady, sometimes
well-intentioned lawyers who fight to fatten the rolls of disability
recipients.

These
lawyers get a cut of every winning claimant’s “back pay.” The more clients, the
bigger the take. That’s why they run ads on TV shouting, “Disabled? Get the
money you deserve!”

Then
there are the doctors. Joffe-Walt profiles one rural Alabama doctor who signs
off on disabilities for pretty much anyone lacking a good education on the
assumption their employment prospects are grim.

That
points to the even bigger parts of the story. As the nature of the economy
changes, disability programs are sometimes taking the place of welfare for
those who feel locked out of the workforce — and state governments are loving
it. States pay for welfare, the feds pay for disabilities.

There are
those who are quick to argue that this is all bogus, there’s nothing amiss with
the disability system that greater funding and a better economy won’t fix.
Maybe they’re right. One way to find out would be to ask every recipient to get
a thorough examination, just as they did in Britain.

Maybe the
results here in the United States would be interesting, too.

JONAH GOLDBERG is editor-at-large of National
Review Online. His column is distributed by Tribune Media Services Inc.

Comments

DentonRC.com is now using Facebook Comments. To post a comment, log into Facebook and then add your comment below. Your comment is subject to Facebook's Privacy Policy and Terms of Service on data use. If you don't want your comment to appear on Facebook, uncheck the 'Post to Facebook' box. To find out more, read the FAQ .